An Old Echo Fades Away
by viper2999
Summary: Rogue, dragged back into the war against the Sentinels by Jubilee, and heckled out of inaction by a literal ghost from her past, finds herself forced to lead her friends in a history spanning campaign, culminating in a battle for the past she once rejected.
1. Chapter 1

Notes:

Something of an Alternate Universe retelling of Marvel's and Fox's _Days of Future Past_. I'll be sticking a little closer to the comic book in some ways, less so in others. I'll also be focusing more on the kids, and who they are in the future, than the film did. For the purposes of FFN, I'm indexing this under the X-Men Movies instead of the comic books, even though one of the main characters is from the comics. This will essentially be my take on how Rachel Grey/Summers could exist in the movie universe.

All arc titles are ripped shamelessly from the comic books. This first one ("Here Comes Tomorrow") is from _New X-Men vol. 1_ #151 – 154, by Grant Morrison and Marc Silvestri.

Main Characters: Rogue, Jubilee, Rachel Grey, Wolverine  
Supporting Characters: Blink, Iceman, Xavier, Magneto, Gambit, Mystique, Amiko Yashida, Yukio, Kitty Pryde  
Other: Northstar, Warpath, Nightcrawler, Sunspot, Bishop, Colossus, Cecilia Reyes, Mindee Cuckoo, Quicksilver

* * *

**An Old Echo Fades Away**

_An "X-Men: Days of Future Past" alternate universe story_

**J.M. Andersen**

* * *

**Uncanny X-Force #1 (Here Comes Tomorrow part 1 of 6)**

The three mutants were standing beyond the access tunnel to the old Cold War bunker. The skies above them were slate overcast, and the air was typical of the Urals in December. They had been in the field the better part of the last three days, working three man shifts of eight hours each—three on guard out in the cold, and three more inside, whether resting or working.

The current look-out shift had fallen to Warpath, Blink, and Sunspot. Warpath stood like the mountain they guarded, eyes closed and ears opened, listening for the sound of their enemy's approach, and sensitive even to the most minor trembling in the earth or rustling of the wind from even kilometers away. Blink was the squad runner, one of only two members of the team who could easily move through the intentionally collapsed access tunnel—a quick security measure put in place by Colossus when he brought the mountain down to seal them safely inside. It would be her job to alert the others if and when (it was always "when") the Sentinels arrived.

Sunspot—Roberto—was notionally the backup, just the extra bit of muscle kept on hand for the just-in-cases. They were glad for his presence all the same, as even on an overcast day, with less sunlight to empower him, he could keep the ambient temperature raised enough to warm them. It was still bitterly cold, but only just cold enough for the chill to keep them alert, without the risk of freezing their sensations to the point of torpor.

For James Proudstar, he did not know how long he had been waiting. There was no danger of nodding off or becoming hypnotized by silence, as there were so many unique, and interesting sounds and vibrations to keep his attention on. Every scrap of dead wood, carried by an unexpected bellow of wind, scratching across the dusty surface of the mountain shelf, was one he had to puzzle out and positively identify as not-a-threat. At some point, Rogue would arrive to relive him. Until then, he would be still as he had been.

So, he didn't know how long it had been or how far he had to go, as time dilated and stretched out along with his perceptions, when he finally heard them coming.

Through the soles of his feet, he could feel the ground shaking beneath the pressure wake of the low flying airship. He could hear the wind sheering around the blockish, obelisk shaped, Sentinel Carrier; as well as the grinding locomotive cycling of superheated turbine blades keeping it aloft, and the rumbling of hanger bulkheads beginning to cycle, and the hum of pressurized superheated water being cycled out of the thermonuclear fusion tokamak that powered it.

Warpath snapped out of his trance, imagining that he could feel his joints creek from long misuse, knowing all the same that it was just the familiar pop of cartilage in the cold air.

"How many?" Sunspot asked, catching the subtle jerk as James' posture tensed.

"A full carrier," Warpath answered.

"_Merda_," he quickly bit out, but Warpath's attention was elsewhere.

He was about to call out, and could see the familiar magenta glow of Blink beginning to form one of her light daggers, when Rogue walked through the bunker's inaccessible entrance.

"What's the situation?"

James hadn't heard her coming, could never hear or _feel _her coming, and it still unsettled him after all of these years. It always put him into mind of another woman that his keen senses could never warn him about in time.

"See for yourself," Jimmy responded.

Rogue just closed her eyes and focused on her environment with Warpath's own duplicated senses at her call.

"What now?" Roberto asked. "Run or fight?"

"Tell the others to pack up," Rogue told Blink, while allowing her body to sample and replicate Sunspot and Blink's mutations. "We have most of what we came for."

Blink just nodded and threw her dagger at the wall, waiting a few short fractions of a second for it to finish sheering through the space that separated her from the rest of her teammates.

She ran through her portal as soon as it had completely torn its way into the heart of the bunker.

"Sentinels. We're leaving," she said, as she exited her portal to find Piotr and Lucas in the process of disassembling munitions.

"Understood," was all Bishop said, as he set down the piece he had been working on, and joined Piotr in breaking down his component. Colossus had been further along in his task, and they could better use their time finishing one last unit than in futilely racing against the clock for nothing.

"There are still more—" Piotr began, when Bishop stopped him.

"Its not worth it. We still have enough."

Blink waited for them, rolling a newly formed dagger between her fingers as she prepared for their egress, while Colossus and Bishop packed up. They quickly finished salvaging their last unit and loading the last useful component into a heavy steel case, which was affixed to a carrying frame and a thick nylon harness. Piotr finished securing it while Lucas prepared himself for the violence to come, strapping himself in to the capacitor vest that focused his mutant abilities, and in turn plugging it into his plasma rifle.

The metal case and its lining alone must have weighed more than a hundred kilograms, but in his armored organic steel form, Colossus was able to heft it easily. He nodded his readiness, and reached up to catch the weapon that Lucas had thrown him. It was a similar rifle to the one Bishop carried, but without the external capacitor, and one that relied only on its own limited energy cell to function. It was not usually his preference to wield firearms, being far more effective in battle using his fists, but today it would be his duty to stay out of direct combat if possible. His weapon's plasma discharges would be sufficient for that purpose.

Regardless of his relegation to indirect combatant, he was still all but invulnerable in his armored form, and ran shoulder-to-shoulder with Lucas, ahead of Blink, as the three ran through one of her portals to rejoin the others.

Colossus found himself immediately stricken by a Sentinel's plasma beam, where it proved unable to cope with Warpath's speed and veered wide to the left of him. It would have been a potentially crippling blow had it struck its intended target but Colossus merely grunted, staggering slightly, before squaring his shoulders and accepting it as it rolled harmlessly off of his armored bulk.

To his right, Lucas stepped out in front of him, relying on his own mutation to absorb the Sentinel's energetic plasma discharge. His eyes and veins throbbed with a red energy field that soon flowed through his capacitor vest and surged in turn into his rifle's power cells.

Colossus had crossed back behind Bishop, obtaining a clear line of fire and shot the Sentinel twice in its knee joint, causing it to stumble as the destructive beam weapon discharging from its cavernous face veered uselessly into the sky. Bishop then fired a blast of burning, unstable, plasma directly into the firing chamber within the Sentinel's face, buckling and cauterizing off the critical portions of its focusing mechanism. It was Blink who finished it off, flicking one of her magenta daggers right through its core, sheering off its primary energy conduits and teleporting them away. The Sentinel went down, but it was not destroyed.

They knew from long experience that even now it would just transform its body to reroute its critical systems through redundancies, and that once it had, it would be able to keep fighting as it finished repairing itself. They had bought themselves very little, only a few extra moments of time, and not even a single step towards an actual victory.

Of their remaining three teammates, Bobby was the one who immediately drew Blink's attention. He stood aglow with so much heat and energy, a blackened body shrouded in a corona of solar fire, that he really did look like a sunspot beneath it all.

She caught a brief glance of James running so quickly that he was a blur striking out towards a Sentinel. It saw him coming from too far away, and its hand begun to shift into a long blade, but Blink had long experience at fighting around James Proudstar. Even as Lucas and Piotr fired away at the other nearby threats, she was able to lead one of her throws far enough in front of James that it caught him before the Sentinel could. He ran into it before he could react, and vanished behind a falling curtain of magenta light as the Sentinel struck at empty air. He adjusted as Blink's power caught him, only to race out of a new portal from behind the Sentinel, and slice through the machine's lower back with one of his adamantium bowie knifes.

It was made sluggish by the damage and James easily leapt away. He went up through a new portal, that sheered its way into the space above him, emerging from behind a completely different Sentinel. He threw his knives, catching it in a three-man pincer with the gunfire provided by Bishop and Colossus, before dashing to them and tearing them back out with a slashing heave.

Blink turned her attention to Roberto, who was struggling to hold a Sentinel at bay, caught in a grapple with the powerful machine, his hands pinning its massive wrists. His sun-fueled strength, on this cloudy day, was proving to be of little use before the mechanical monster but he had redoubled his efforts and managed to partially melt its forearms and hands before they were able to shift form.

Another Sentinel dove for him, prepared to take advantage of his prone form, but Blink was able to rip the space ahead of its trajectory. She teleported it as it struck, and into new position for to involuntarily stab the machine Sunspot was engaged with. The one Sentinel's arm pierced the other through its side, and Roberto gave a heave and threw them both away, and into another one of Blink's daggers. The two machines plummeted from the sky, kilometers in the distance.

Elsewhere Rogue was, as usual, the only one of them who could really hold her own against even Sentinel, let alone two at once. With Warpath's speed, reflexes, and sensory awareness added to her own ability, it wasn't difficult for her to perpetually evade them, weaving in and around their blows, and just turning intangible when she couldn't evade anymore. She just danced around them, occasionally tossing a magenta dagger to aid the others, and sometimes while opportunistically allowing her fist to blacken with solar intensity. It was on those occasions that she would lash out to smash a Sentinel into the ground.

It was a stalemate even at that, until Blink and the others rejoined them, and she felt both Lucas and Piotr 'click' in the back of her head as she templated their mutations. After that, Rogue felt her strategy simplified greatly.

She immediately armored up with Piotr's power, and let one of the Sentinels blast away at her as she rushed in to engage the other, absorbing its energy with Bishop's mutation and using it in turn to fuel what she had taken from Roberto's. She maneuvered around the second Sentinel's spear-bladed limb, phased her hand into its chest, and took hold of the indistinct, rapidly shifting, mass of unstable matter within it. Go ahead, she thought, shift your molecules all you want—I've still got you. She lifted it off the ground, spun it to build extra momentum, and slammed it down into the earth powerfully enough to shake the area and visibly indent the ground. She flashed it away with Blink's mutation while it was still stunned.

"Marie!" Piotr called out, as he, James, and Lucas finished subduing their target. "We're ready!"

Rogue nodded before moving to deal with the last of the Sentinels' small advance force. She used her borrowed speed to jump on its head and pushed down with her feet as she phased it, through to its waist, into the earth. Before it could reroute its systems, she formed and stabbed a pair of glowing magenta daggers into each of its shoulder joints to prevent it from moving; she flipped herself around, landing on its back, using a handhold on the course material of its shoulder area to keep herself steady. She phased her other hand down through the top of its head and neck, and channeled the remnants of the energy she had absorbed through Bishop's power, to spew highly energized fire through its defenseless interior until its entire midsection had begun to glow and buckle.

She dropped it to the ground and jumped off its ruined body. That was finally one down for good—the first and only one they would actually manage to destroy that day.

"Rogue," Jimmy reminded her, gesturing towards the Sentinel Carrier. They could both feel the hanger bulkheads winding back open, in preparation for another, larger, wave of the machines to emerge. It wouldn't be long before it descended upon them. Already the Sentinels had begun recalculating the six mutants' precarious tactical position.

"Alright, lets get out of here," Rogue decided, armoring down and allowing the power she copied from Roberto to drain away.

She held out her arms, and one by one felt them each taking a hold of her. James and Bobby each taking one of her hands in theirs, and Lucas and Piotr wrapping one of their large hands around her upper arms. Blink was the last, touching her on the back while quickly forming a cluster of daggers in her free hand.

Rogue phased all six of them into one of the deeper states of intangibility that she still (even after years) had trouble maintaining, before Blink released her daggers and plunged them all through a hole in space that ran all the way through the world.

* * *

Only hours later, they were camped down along the northern coasts of Peru.

Lucas was at work trying to contact Jubilee. With any luck they would be able to arrange a rendezvous soon, and make their delivery to the X-Men.

Rogue herself wandered exhausted, sleepy, through their temporary camp. It was supposed to be—and normally would have been—her turn on watch, but using her mutation like that always had this effect on her. She just came to a halt once the adrenaline had time to wear down. Overusing either Bobby's or Lucas' ability to store and project energy was always like this, especially if she misjudged it and spent too much of what she had at once—easy to do when using both their mutations simultaneously.

Even when she copied their mutations with skin contact (the way her mutation _wanted_ to be used), gaining their memories and the ability to use their abilities as well as they could, neither Bobby nor Lucas knew anything about using their abilities in synergy with each other. Not in the same body. And without skin contact, without their memories, there was a lot more trial and error in the mastery of borrowed powers. She wouldn't trade it for anything, being actually functional, capable of human touch, and being able to help her friends without needing to drain the life from them to do it. But still, there were times when it was just so tiring, even when she was younger.

And then there was this damned intangibility...

She sat down, for just a second. She couldn't stop thinking of how tempting it would be to just close her eyes, only for a moment...

"You shouldn't just nod off like that, y'know. Do you really think you're safe? Anything can happen, at any time, even when its all aches and pains. They count on you to take care of them even when it's inconvenient to you," said the voice of the only mutant Rogue had ever absorbed permanently. Maybe it was her voice running jittery shivers through Rogue's spine, or maybe she was just playing around and it actually _was _her little ghostly fingers poking into her nerves.

She only noticed her eyes were closed when she opened them, and saw the smaller woman crouched in front of her, feet sunk into the sand, and her arms braced weightlessly against Rogue's knees. Kitty—no, her name is _Widget_, she reminded herself—just smiled up at her, like it was still old times.

"I still think you're not real," Rogue said.

"I'm hurt. I thought we had something special."

"No one else can see you but me. Sounds like a hallucination." Or maybe you're just a spirit and you're haunting me.

"Who says? I can talk to whoever I want."

"Then how come I'm the only one who can see you?" Why don't you go haunt someone else, for once, she doesn't say.

"You're the only one that's interesting," Kitty shrugged. "And I want to show you something. You know, since you're not busy?"

Rogue leaned back, automatically moving out of the way, as Kitty's left hand extended towards her face. Her eyes drew down to focus, not on the sarcastic grin that she expected to see, but on the three rings that she had kept wearing even now.

"You do trust me, right Rogue?" she asked.

She bit back the obvious instinctive reply, but never had a chance to find out what she actually would have said, when Kitty just pressed her intangible hand to her forehead without waiting for permission. No matter how much experience she once had with it, she couldn't help but scream at the explosive pain igniting her trigeminal nerve, as Kitty connected to her and Projected the razor glass shards of her power right through her face.

"There," Kitty said, when they stood together on the shores of Alkali Lake—or rather the river and flood planes that had replaced it when the old dam was destroyed. "Could a hallucination do that?"

"Actually, I think, yes," Rogue said, when she had settled down enough to no longer hear the obvious attempts of her racing heart to escape her body by punching through her lungs and swimming up her throat. No, wait, the sound in her ears and the pain in her chest were just a coincidence.

That pulsing, throbbing, sensation that she felt... pulling every hair on her body on end even through her uniform... pulling the water in her body towards it, and then pushing back, so quickly that she was sure she was going to vomit any second now... that was something else.

"I just wanted to introduce you to your future teammate," Kitty said, as she walked towards It. "It wont be very long now."

Towards the giant ball of liquid fire that was floating in the shallow near bank of the river. It was almost as tall as Rogue herself and if she tried _just _hard enough, she could almost see the patch of shadows that hinted at the shape inside. The Egg pulsed, flaring with a momentary luminescence, and Rogue felt her hair and the loose edges of her uniform—the collar of her top, her belt buckle, her zipper—tugging against gravity. The loose rocks and soil scattered around them floated in the air along with drops of loose moisture and dew that for an instant looked like a summer rainfall caught in time.

And then the pulse ended, and it all fell to the ground, including the pit forming in Rogue's stomach.

"I've been keeping her company," Kitty said, strolling over to brush a hand casually against the Egg—and letting Rogue play audience to the brief crackle of energy as something within that thin shell of constrained fire pulled against the clear white threads of Kitty's mutation. "Just until she wakes up."

* * *

**Next: **Uncanny X-Men #1 – Jubilee helps an old classmate out of a bind. The X-Men are reunited. Rogue talks herself out of a PET-MRI.


	2. Chapter 2

Notes: Thanks for the comments, bookmarks and follows. Sorry about the delayed output—Nostalgia was eating my life. I also went through one of those horrible moments of realization that lead you from "I think I want to write a time travel story" to "Oh God, I'm writing about time travel."

Chapters 3 and 4 are done in draft form already, and I'm outlined through chapter 9, so there should be shorter turnover.

* * *

**An Old Echo Fades Away**

_An "X-Men: Days of Future Past" alternate universe story_

**J.M. Andersen**

* * *

**Uncanny X-Men #1** **(Here Comes Tomorrow part 2 of 6)**

Jubilee was sitting at one of the curved work station tables along the outer circle of the map room. Both of her cybernetic gloves were broken down and disassembled into their individual components, lying on the white back-lit surface. Like the other work areas, it had a three-joint magnifying lamp anchored to a small slot in the wall, and she had pulled it out for a better look at what she was doing. Tools were scattered, but more that she had never been a very orderly person, than because she was actually using all of them.

When actually assembled and not lying apart in four dozen pieces, the heavily armored gloves enabled her to amplify and collimate her mutation into something a bit more useful than throwing sparkly pyrotechnics at five tonne shape-changing robot killing machines. Strictly speaking, she didn't think she really needed them anymore... but controlled circumstances in the Danger Room weren't the same thing as the pandemonium of the battlefield. The extra degree of security the gloves provided her was one less thing to pay attention to while trying to stay alive.

Right then, it was the control system that was giving her problems. It comprised a thin under-layer in the form of synthetic rubber gloves, with a few obvious circuitry leads on the outside, and far less obvious fiber optics connections and integrated circuitry woven into the polymer substrate itself. They pulled over most of her forearms and all of her hands except for the tips of the fingers—so that they wouldn't interfere with how her body actually projected its pyrotechnics. The other components of the armored metal gauntlets built-up over and interlocked around them, allowing her to control the machines with her nervous system.

The signal strength wasn't good enough at the moment, and she wasn't sure she was up to the task of actually fixing it. She hadn't invented them, and only understood how they worked well enough to maintain them.

"Jubilee?" she heard, in her mind, as Mindee's voice pinged her from within Cerebro. "I can feel psychic distress. It's from Iceman. He's in Western Australia—it feels like he's in danger."

Bobby Drake—Jubilee hadn't seen him in years. It was an unpleasant realization, recognizing that she hadn't even known he was still alive. Hadn't even thought about it.

"Are we over the Pacific yet?"

They had diverted only an hour ago, to make the new rendezvous with Rogue's team.

A moment went by, before Mindee replied.

"Amiko says we're over the Celebes Sea."

"Tell her we're taking the detour. Rogue can wait."

* * *

When they caught up to him, it was over the Stirling Range, while he was caught in the midst of ascending Bluff Knoll. It had taken him almost two hours, with help from moving ice slides, to carry Eva up along several of the more sheer approaches. All part of his manic, desperate, attempt to outrun an out-of-control wildfire—well, he succeeded. Somehow. At that, if at nothing else. And all the while knowing that he was cornering himself, and Eva, and would be killing the both of them if it didn't work out. Not knowing if he could really trust Mindee Cuckoo, the familiar voice that had abruptly climbed into his mind, when she told him that help was on the way. That he needed to find clear ground for extraction.

He, or rather Eva, had been pursued by the Sentinel for the better part of the year. He had just about played his last trick weeks ago, when it had ambushed them outside of what was left of Perth; but they still found ways to keep going longer, a few moments at a time.

But now that he was there, with the end of the continent distantly in sight, he knew they didn't have anywhere else to go. Maybe the altitude would help him make a stand, but he didn't expect that to go well. It hadn't at Perth, either.

That was how he had found himself on the summit, freezing it white to make them more visible from the sky, Eva's chubby toddler arms clutching at him as she shivered in the new cold. He hoped he could trust the voice—Emma's voice, only calling itself Mindee, which only served to remind him that most of the telepaths he knew would have just blocked off his doubts before they could have arisen. He had been tricked before, after all. You couldn't trust anything when it came to Sentinels.

When the explosion crackled in his ears, the stench of burning phosphorous and sulfur, he was sure time had finally caught up with them both. He waited for the fire to wash over him, feeling no immediate relief when it did not. For a moment, he wasn't even sure who he was looking at, when he found himself standing in the unfamiliar cockpit cabin, with the graying visage of Kurt Wagner smiling down at him.

"Target lock on the Omega Sentinel heat signature," Amiko said, from her position at the flight controls.

That snapped him out of it right away.

"Shoot it!" Drake shouted, before the image on Jubilee's screen could resolve.

"Anti-personnel warheads loaded," Amiko continued.

"Wait! Stop!" Jubilee ordered, wide eyes fixed the screen in her hands.

"Sentinel has attacked firewalls seventeen through twenty-three... ECCM engaged... holding..."

"Damn it," Jubilee said, averting her eyes from the screen. There was no need to keep looking at it. "Yashida, open fire."

"I just lost target lock. I can't reengage."

Jubilee tightened her grip, before relaxing in determination.

"Pull back. Just get us out of here."

Amiko answered in the affirmative, and there was a dull hum as the engines and exhaust thrust of the aeroplane cycled from its VTOL setting to forward flight. Shortly thereafter, Amiko was able to reactivate the stealth array; the noise cancellation systems came online, even as they disappeared from radar and infrared, and then the only sound left was that of Drake's breathing.

Not ten minutes later, Cecilia was giving Eva as thorough an examination as possible in their infirmary. Malnutrition was a given, and what had gone down with her parents was so sudden that he wasn't exactly in a position to vouch for her vaccine history (not that he would have been able to do anything about it anyway).

As for himself, he'd passed on being poked and stuck by the doctor. When you could turn your molecules into water and back again, the idea of getting sick evaporated.

He had drifted through the beginning of Eva's exam, waiting just on the edge of the entryway to the sickbay, before running out of reasons to avoid talking to Jubilee. He didn't really know what to say. From the look of things, neither had she.

It should have been easy.

It had been so long, there should have been plenty to catch up on.

After all, he had been on the run ever since... well, he still blamed himself for what happened with Kitty.

At least Jubilee didn't. He knew that now, and that should have made it easier—only strangely, in reality, not.

"I like the scraggly hobo beard," Jubilee broke in, when she ran out of things not to say.

"Thanks," he said, making a show of scratching it. "I've been working on this for months."

"It kind of suits you."

"It does." Maybe literally.

"What were you even doing out there?"

"Running. I had a friend out there... I thought he could help Eva. Too late, though. I guess they caught up to him."

Or maybe age had, but that was too pleasant a thought for reality.

"So..." Jubilee trailed off. The opening was there, but it took her a moment longer to find it. Drake wasn't exactly in a rush to get there either, and didn't mind waiting. "I guess they caught up to St. John, too."

"A long time ago."

"I don't understand why they do this to us. They're only machines."

"They still understand how it affects us. It worked on you, didn't it? You hesitated." The way she collapsed inwards on herself, it almost felt like they were in an entirely different plane—oceans ago, and an eternity away. "Hey, Lee? Don't worry about it. How do you think I feel? So don't worry, I get it."

"How _do _you feel?"

He felt like he'd been waiting eight years—was it eight? It had to have been at least five. Maybe close to ten, with how tall Amiko had gotten. Old enough to arm air-to-ground missiles, Jesus—to tell someone how he felt. Someone who remembered how it was before; and there were still plenty of friends to be made who remembered a time when the Outback was only _part_ of Australia—but not so many people who remembered the other 'before.'

(Any of them).

Or who remembered him.

"I feel like I've loved three people in my life, and two of them are now dead. One of them is maybe worse than dead, and the other I'd kill myself if I could. Don't even get me started on which is which."

"And number three?"

"You already know how that went."

"I guess that means you'll be skipping the reunion."

"Is that where you're headed?"

"Yeah. To Peru. She made a pickup for me. I've... well, I've got a plan. Kind of."

"Rogue, well, she probably doesn't want to see me." That, and it wasn't really safe to just drag a kid into where Jubilee was going. 'Plans' and all of that. "Just drop us off somewhere easy. You've probably already gone out of your way for us. "

"Ah. Jeez, Bobby. You've gotta let me do more for you than that."

"Well..." He looked back, over at Eva. "You wouldn't have anything to eat, would you?"

* * *

She had Amiko land in sight, touching down on the surface of the water, so that the cargo ramp had only just touched dry sand when fully extended.

Jubilee had only just unbuckled her seat when Blink stepped through one of her portals, the magenta light briefly overpowering the well-lit cabin.

She'd always liked Blink. It was weird, in retrospect, that Rogue seemed to trust her so much (of all things considered). It was surprising, anyway, but still good to see.

But she stilled groaned, when Blink told her that they might have kind of a problem.

And, as it turned out, they were going to have to work on that first versus second language barrier. That, or Jubilee would at least have to brush up on her Chinese. Either way, the severe level of understatement was retrospectively unfortunate.

All of a sudden she was happy that they'd dropped Bobby off. Wait, no, that was a pretty horrible thing to think—but still, it was going to spare her a headache.

She left Amiko to handle the cargo bay controls, while Jean-Paul directed Piotr, James, Roberto, and Lucas through loading up the plane. By the time she'd alerted Cecilia and Mindee to the situation, she didn't have long to wait before Blink had accompanied Rogue through another hole in space.

"This has happened before?" Jubilee asked.

"No," Rogue said, immediately.

Mindee, or rather the image of Mindee that was being projected from Cerebro, shook her head, as Jubilee gestured to her.

"She's lying."

"No, I'm not. It's never happened before. Nothing like this. I've just fallen asleep and had dreams. And I've had days where I thought I could hear her voice, or thought I saw her for a second. But that's normal, right?"

"Yeah, sure," Jubilee said. "I mean, it's never happened to me. But sure, why not."

Cecilia took Rogue's distraction as an opportunity to shine a bright light into her eye, using her ophthalmoscope.

"Really? My eye? What could be wrong with my _eye_?"

"There could be signs of arterial hypertension in the blood vessels," Cecilia suggested.

"You think I _had a stroke?_"

"It's a real possibility. There are also other likely indications."

"Is she crazy?" Jubilee asked.

She had asked Cecilia, but Mindee answered first, without hesitation.

"Yes."

"Ok, then—"

"But no more than she usually is," Mindee continued.

"Thanks," Rogue sniffed.

"What I mean is," Mindee said. "Your thoughts are not sick."

Jubilee took a breath.

"Ok, so, she's not crazy. So, maybe it was just real."

"You think that she—"

"It could just be a memory, couldn't it?" Jubilee said, cutting off Cecilia. "Maybe Rogue is remembering things that Widget knew, and this is just how her brain is processing it."

"So what, you're suggesting that Jean Grey is coming back from the dead?" Cecilia asked. "The crazy burning lady from Alcatraz?"

"I'm not suggesting anything, except that Rogue isn't delusional, or hallucinating, so maybe she's just remembering something important."

Blink had backed her suggestion, both then, and when the others were finished and they had all gathered in the map room. She had been the first one to suggest just going back to Alkali Lake, and putting it to rest. Rogue's team needed to know, if nothing else. And Kurt had supported her.

"Blink or I could go. Apart, or a pair. My range is good enough in... maybe twenty jumps? An hour at most, if I grow tired," he suggested.

"Unless there are a million Sentinels already there," James said.

Blink just shrugged.

"Why would there be?" she asked.

"I can't detect any mutant signatures in that area," Mindee said. "There could be something too faint for me to read at this range."

"Can you not increase it?" Piotr asked.

"Yes, but I'll flare intensely enough for the Sentinels to pick up my mutation globally."

"And, if we boost reactor output to Cerebro, it'll break stealth mode," Amiko said. "It's a big plane. They'll pick us up over land."

"It'd be better if we just diverted and looked," Jubilee said. "Amiko can do a flyover. If it checks out, we can take a closer look on the ground."

"We already have our mission," Jean-Paul said.

"It'll keep a few days if it has to," Jubilee replied.

"And," Kurt began. "Is our mission more important than knowing whether or not Rogue, our friend and teammate, is mad?"

Northstar just weighed that.

"Fair enough," he said with a slight nod.

* * *

"Hey!"

Rogue called out, once they were underway.

"Hey, Lee!" She said, again, finally phasing through a bulkhead to catch up to her. "Lee, I don't like this."

"I thought you'd be okay with proving you're not crazy."

"You told me you had a plan."

"I do."

"And I agreed with you that it might work, that's the only reason we're here with you. We should focus on _that_."

"We can be at Alkali in three hours, best speed without breaking stealth. It's not that far out of the way, for just a flyover and a quick look."

"What if what I saw was real?" Rogue asked. "Have you thought about that? We all made a decision to get away from all of that, and you'll have us racing right back in."

"If it is true?" Jubilee drew out, measuring. "Right where Jean died? Sorry, 'died.' We can't just leave it lying around for the Sentinels to find."

"It's been years. If it's something I'm just, I don't know, remembering? Than it's been years, and they haven't found anything yet. So why would they now? Or they have, and they're waiting, and we're all going to die."

"We still need to check it out. If it's real, then either way, we have to check it out. We'll be careful. And I trust my crew, and I trust your team, to keep us safe if anything goes wrong."

"But just suppose you were right, before. Suppose I really am getting some of her memories. What do you suggest we do? Is this just a one time thing, or do we just let them lead us around? Because that's what I'm afraid of happening. It's too tempting to just go along with it."

"I just want us all to live, Marie. Whatever gives us the best chance of that, is fine by me."

"We didn't discuss the other possibility."

"What's that?"

"It's not a memory. It's not a hallucination. It _is_ real. And she's just found a way to keep screwing with us."

Jubilee caught herself before she could flinch, but it wasn't good enough.

"Oh, so it did occur to you. And here I thought I was just crazy."

"Marie, I'm cruising around the world in a plane she designed. You're leading a team she put together. The world we're in? This is a future that she built for us, and we still don't know where it's all going. We don't even know why this happened, why there are still Sentinels in the first place. "

Rogue shifted in resignation, but not in any real acceptance.

"I'll go along with it, but only until we know how to get off the rails. Like you said, we don't really_ know_ what she was planning for us. We'll never beat the Sentinels if we're always tripping over her."

"Over ourselves," Jubilee corrected. "We all helped, remember? You more than the rest of us."

"That was a mistake," Rogue spat.

"Maybe. I don't know? Maybe it was better than this, at least. Maybe we were better off."

"Maybe we were better off?" Rogue asked, incredulously. "Do you even remember how crazy things got? How many lives we destroyed, because we wanted ours to be better? 'They're not real people anyway.' Blink actually said that to me, once. She doesn't remember it. You wouldn't either. Even I don't remember everything, but I remember enough."

"Then what do you want? Because I can stop the Sentinels, I _know_ I can, but what do we do after that? As best as Mindee can figure out, there are _maybe_ three million left. People. Total. We can stop the Sentinels but they've still already won. What do we do next?"

"I don't know. But neither did Magneto, or the Professor, or Widget."

"Yeah, well, I don't know either."

* * *

**Next:** Uncanny X-Force #2 – Rogue's luck continues.


End file.
